My particular hate is advertisements which are automatically generated.

Why?

My take on this is that the webmaster has no real control. I don’t want to put my reputation behind products which I know nothing about and haven’t used.

So, what is my Ads and Info Page?

It’s my attempt to showcase products or services that I have found reliable, useful and valuable to me.

I prefer free – free as in no payment, free as in unrestricted, free as in Open Source, but sometimes a commercial product is best.

It’s a sad fact that I have no source of top quality free cameras or lenses.

Each time I introduce a new feature I’ll try to highlight it here.

I’m starting with Spam:

I get a lot of Spam and as a webmaster I try to stop it.

On my site I invite you to sign up for my RSS feed.

You can do it by email – trouble is giving an email to a website is inviting trouble.

Like a lot of web users I like to sign up for information, forums, offers. Sometimes I want the RSS Feed of a favourite site. Sometimes I’m interest in helping my Page Rank and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – whatever the reason it’s a minefield.

Here’s an example from the other day:

I signed up a few months ago to a photo forum which I found interesting and seemed reputable. As usual I was promised that my email would not be passed on.

But: (I’ve left out names and other details)

Good day,

This is to inform you that you funds $50,000.00 thousand USA Dollars due
has been uploaded into CORPORATE VISA CARD and also i have registered it
with DHL COMPANY for delivery to you.

Note DHL mandated that your VISA CARD will be shipped, A Tax/Stamp Duty
MUST be procured according to the New Customs Creed and the essence of
such Document is to ensure a hitch-free delivery to your address and the
amount is $70.usd.

2 Responses to Nothing but Blue Skies 1

I just checked, and the photography forum I just started at http://www.thephotobusinessforum.com has a profile page for each user where the email address is displayed. I wonder if there are plugins I need to install or options I need to set where the email address isn’t displayed. Are you thinking that the email address was harvested by a crawler or that the mailing list was sold by the forum administrator. FYI – if you signed up for my forum and got spam, I’m really sorry – I can start looking into ways to cut down on the spam if that is the case.

Hi
The good news is that I’m not receiving spam from your forum – yet.
Still, if my email is showing I’m sure it will come.
I have signed up but to be frank it never occurred to me that my email would automatically show up.
I don’t mind because I’m using gishpuppy but otherwise I’d steer well clear.
That’s the first problem – lots of people won’t sign up if they can’t hide their email.
I think the best approach is to have an internal communication system for members only – FaceBook not always known for privacy concerns has this, RedBubble has an internal bubblemail, and .. the list goes on.
And then it gets worse.
If I use my standard email and start getting spam, how will I know where it comes from? It’s possible to check the headings and so on and try a trace but spammers are good at hiding their tracks.
If I use gishpuppy, I know who is spamming me and can cancel immediately.
The consequences for the forum are not good.
The forum loses a member.
The forum may be identified publicly as a source of spam and marked down on WOT and similar sites.
The forum will get bounced undelivered mails.
I’m confident that there must always be an option for the email not to show.
One other idea for a forum (and any site) is to design the robots.txt file carefully to exclude known malignant crawlers.
This needs some care as it has SEO implications – don’t want to exclude Google by mistake.
Thanks for visiting again